Facebook Studied Users' Brainwaves For Its Advertisers

A "neurological" study
of Facebook, Yahoo! and The New York Times found that
Facebook triggered greater levels of attention, emotional
engagement, and memory than the other two did, and is thus a
premium medium for advertisers. The results of the study
shouldn't be too surprising given that Facebook itself
commissioned the study.

The study was slightly bizarre because it involved recording
users' brainwaves while they were looking at the three
sites. The study was conducted by Neurofocus, a
neurological marketing research agency that places EEG censors on
consumers heads' to record their brainwaves while they engage
with media. The picture at right shows one of the devices
Neurofocus uses to conduct these studies (although that
particular device was different to the one used for Facebook).

Users looked at their own “News Feed” on Facebook, the default
home page of Yahoo! and the default home page of The New York Times. Unsurprisingly,
people's brains were significantly more engaged when looking at
their friends' pictures and status updates than they were looking
at Yahoo's unpersonalized page full of headlines and generic
news. Here are the results in chart form:

While EEG can measure neural activation, Neurofocus interpreted
its results by taking that a step further and suggesting this had
consequences for advertisers:

"All of these differences appear to be related to the
expectations people bring to these sites when they visit them,
and these expectations, in turn, appear to impact how people
respond to advertising on these sites."